Security mechanisms for the MAP agent system

Mobile agents represent a new communication paradigm which has recently obtained a great deal of attention from researchers and practitioners. Interesting applications exist in the fields of distributed systems management, mobility and information retrieval. Although widely recognized as a crucial point to be addressed, security has not been pursued in a satisfactory way yet. Most of all the existing software environments for agent programming do not offer security features or provide only partial implementations. We propose a security schema for mobile agents and describe its implementation inside the MAP platform. Some experimental results are also provided to evaluate the overhead introduced from the adoption of the proposed security mechanism.